At the turn of the 21st century, New York literati would often shut down attempts to discuss the latest television shows with the sniffy refrain “I don’t even own a TV.” I remember one particular book party at which a cluster of hot young novelists collectively agreed that they wouldn’t mind having their books optioned for the small screen—as long as no one ever got around to making them. TV in those days was still scorned as a distraction factory churning out bland entertainment in standardized 30- or 60-minute chunks punctuated by Pavlovian laugh lines and pre-commercial-break cliff-hangers.

That snobbery gradually turned inside out as the medium evolved from delivering conventional network fare aimed at the broadest possible audience into a vehicle for the much-hyped new golden age. Prestige dramas and idiosyncratic comedies put a premium on nuance and experimentation, on complex characterization and scintillating dialogue. In other words, all the things for which literary fiction is known. So utterly has the literati’s disdain for the small screen dissolved that nowadays novelists are lining up to have their books adapted. If you eavesdrop on any gathering of serious writers, they’re as likely to be discussing Killing Eve or Better Call Saul as they are the latest book by Zadie Smith or Rachel Kushner. Even the University of Iowa is launching TV-writing programs this fall.

“I see everybody talking about TV like they would talk about books,” says Megan Abbott, author of 10 novels (including Dare Me, which she is developing into a series) and a writer on the HBO series The Deuce. “[The writers I know] take the shows they watch very seriously.”

And why not? Peak TV has turned the industry into a monstrous maw starving for writing talent. Last year, nearly 500 scripted series aired on broadcast, cable, and streaming outlets. Netflix alone plans to unleash 700 original series and movies in 2018. This attention overload means that standing out from the pack is paramount.

“You need more writers with a willingness to experiment, more points of view,” says Nick Antosca, who published fiction on small presses before becoming a TV writer and show-runner (currently on Syfy’s Channel Zero and the forthcoming Hulu series The Act, alongside journalist Michelle Dean). The emphasis in the industry has, by necessity, moved toward developing niche appeal rather than broad viewership. “There’s an openness on the part of TV executives to finding strange thinkers,” says Antosca.

Amelia Gray is one of those strange thinkers who is flourishing in the new world of TV. The author of wonderfully eerie, perverse fiction, Gray recently found herself working in the writers’ rooms for USA’s Mr. Robot and the forthcoming Netflix series Maniac. “I am the weirdo,” she says with a laugh of her contributions to Maniac.

Although TV writing draws on some of the same basic skills as fiction does (a head for plot, character development, and crackling but realistic dialogue), the process is wildly different. “Working as a novelist means you are the god of the story,” Gray says. TV writing tends to be a collaborative art in which both the grand arc of the series and the tiny details get forged collectively.

Abbott says that sometimes she comes up with a trajectory for a character that everyone in the room agrees upon, “but you have to keep pushing it to the center of discussion over and over again, or it’ll get lost. . . And once the show goes into production, there are so many things that can make that story line that you pitched not happen,” she continues. “It really brought out my more assertive qualities!”

On The Deuce, Abbott is surrounded by a murderers’ row of seasoned novelists, including Richard Price, Lisa Lutz, and co-show-runner George Pelecanos. David Simon, its other co-show-runner, has been drafting novelists into writers’ rooms since The Wire, when he first approached Pelecanos, Price, and Dennis Lehane. As Lehane explained in Jonathan Abrams’s recent oral history, All the Pieces Matter: The Inside Story of The Wire, Simon “thought most TV writers had probably picked up bad habits working on bad shows for network TV.”

A number of show-runners have followed in Simon’s footsteps, recruiting scribes who haven’t toiled their way up the network ladder. Queen of the South co-creator Joshua John Miller, himself a novelist, says that when it came to staffing the series, “I only wanted novelists and playwrights”—the kind of writers who “thought deeply about character as opposed to typical writing in Hollywood that’s all about plot and act breaks.”

Noah Hawley, the novelist who serves as mastermind of the FX series Fargo and Legion, says television has taught him economy: “how to find that perfect moment.” He sees many elements of TV writing as useful for honing storytelling skills, even the act of selling a concept to executives. “Pitching is a critical experience for writers, because if I have to tell you a story in 10 minutes, I learn very quickly what makes you care about a story.”

Increasingly, the industry is ransacking bookshelves for adaptable novels and short stories. And fiction writers are becoming show-runners themselves (see Gillian Flynn and Neil Gaiman, who have forthcoming series based on their own work). Tom Perrotta, known for novels such as Election and Little Children, initially felt daunted by the process of adapting his book The Leftovers into a drama series. But he learned much from the process (and from executive producer Damon Lindelof) that he can tap into when he serves as show-runner on HBO’s forthcoming half-hour comedy based on his most recent novel, Mrs. Fletcher.

Perrotta says he also absorbed lessons that seeped back into his fiction. For instance, he and Lindelof often argued about using coincidence as a plot device. While he had always been careful to avoid it in his novels, for realism’s sake, “Damon was coming at it from a Dickensian standpoint: our story has its own kind of gravity and it is pulling our characters together.” Perrotta continues, “It was liberating to me to realize I was operating with a much-too-uptight idea” of how narrative can work.

Attica Locke, who is developing her novel Bluebird, Bluebird into a series and is writing for Ava DuVernay’s mini-series, Central Park Five, says she found being in the writers’ room for Empire exhilarating in a different way. “My entire artistic and creative life and career was not on the line, so there was a sense of ‘Oh, let’s play: this is fun!’,” she says.

So many serious writers are now fixing their sights on television that the University of Iowa, home of the venerable Iowa Writers’ Workshop, has just launched a postgraduate TV-writing fellowship and will begin a workshop focused on the specialization this fall.

“With the almost metastatic growth of good scripted, character-driven television, we’ve had more and more of our writers from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop headed to L.A.,” says Jane Van Voorhis, the University of Iowa Center for Advancement’s assistant vice president for development. Among them are Game of Thrones show-runner D. B. Weiss, Girls scribe Sarah Heyward, The Terror show-runner David Kajganich, and Sam Shaw, co-creator of the forthcoming series Castle Rock. “Not everyone is going to go on to write a best-seller or teach,” adds Van Voorhis, “so we have to prepare them for other ways to use their writerly skills.”

Alongside the aesthetic pleasures of writing for television, there are obvious practical benefits. Rachel Shukert, a novelist and playwright currently writing for GLOW, says she sometimes hears Hollywood colleagues complain about the poor wages for starting jobs in TV writers’ rooms. But being paid $4,000 and up per week sure beats the $30,000 advance you might get (if you’re lucky) for a novel that took years to write. “I was like, ‘I’m rich, I’m so rich!’,” Shukert exclaims. Yet from a studio’s point of view, she continues, it’s “a relatively small expenditure. . . to get somebody who has all this life experience and this body of work and voice.”

There’s also the thrill of working on something that feels central to the culture. The biggest surprise for a novelist about writing for television might be that there is a mass audience for their work. Gray recalls her amazement at the discovery of an Internet forum devoted to Mr. Robot, with fans poring over every frame. “Wow, people really care!” she says. “It’s every novelist’s fantasy.”

My German Brother

By Chico BuarqueChico Buarque, Brazilian pop legend and one of the founders of Tropicalismo, has developed into an intriguing and inventive novelist as well, with works such as Budapest (2003), Spilt Milk (2009), and others. The language of My German Brother (Farrar, Straus and Giroux) is musical and serpentine, as he unravels a tale that is part historical mystery, part intellectual and sexual coming-of-age. In 1960s São Paulo, adolescent son Ciccio stumbles upon an old love letter in one of his father’s books—a note from a German woman who his father met while studying in Berlin in the early 30s. Ciccio’s obsessive desire to learn more about his father’s past (and the existence of a possible half brother) leads him to Germany decades later where, an old man now himself, he finds he is no closer to the truth. (Amazon.com)

Photo: Courtesy of Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

I Didn’t Talk

By Beatriz BracherBeatriz Bracher’s novel I Didn’t Talk (New Directions), also set in Brazil, covers some of the same territory that Buarque glances by—the militant movements of the 1960s and the government’s brutal repression—but her take is darker, quieter, and more pointed. The novel’s main character, Gustavo, is a São Paulo professor preparing to retire and move outside the city. Like My German Brother’s Ciccio, he struggles to make sense of simmering family resentments and deceptions, all while battling the memory of his imprisonment and torture more than 40 years ago in 1970. Did he snitch on his brother-in-law, Armando, a student radical who was later murdered? He swears he didn’t talk, but he is at a loss to find the words to express the grief and shame that still haunts him—and his country. (Amazon.com)

Photo: Courtesy of New Directions.

The Marvellous Equations Of The Dread: A Novel In Bass Riddim

By Marcia Douglas
What is a novel in “bass riddim”? In Jamaican writer-performer Marcia Douglas’s hands, it’s a pulsating tale revolving around the return of Bob Marley’s spirit on a Kingston street corner dubbed Half Way Tree, which throbs with a history of lynching and uprisings. It’s about the transmigration of souls—Marley reappears in the body of a street prophet-madman, one of Jamaica’s so-called “fall-down angels”—but it also celebrates the reggae star’s very physical affair with a deaf woman named Leenah in late-70s London. It’s about Rasta dreams and the powerful vibrations of consciousness that are passed down through generations. (The ghosts of Haile Selassie and Marcus Garvey also make walk-on appearances at Half Way Tree.) Told in brief bursts, or “tracks,” The Marvellous Equations of the Dread (New Directions) is a whirlwind of a novel that sways to an irresistible beat. (Amazon.com)

Photo: Courtesy of Peepal Tree Press Ltd.

Flights

By Olga TokarczukOlga Tokarczuk is a Polish writer who crosses borders, literary and geographic, with ease, capturing here a panorama of lives in motion in short vignettes, anecdotes, ruminations, pictures, and maps. Meandering through time and global vistas, Flights (Riverhead, and winner of the 2018 Man Booker International Prize) considers human migration in its myriad forms. The book’s narrator, like the author, shuttles between airports, hotels, and far-flung destinations, pondering eternal questions of belonging and displacement. (Echoing the late English travel writer Bruce Chatwin, famously nomadic himself, she often ends up wondering, “What am I doing here?”) Meanwhile, Tokarczuk interweaves stories of fictional and historical travelers—including Chopin’s sister and a 17th-century Dutch anatomist—preoccupied with their own investigations of the heart, mind, and Achilles tendon. (Amazon.com)

Photo: Courtesy of Riverhead Books.

The Bottom Of The Sky

By Rodrigo Fresán
Argentine author Rodrigo Fresán has been spinning wildly original, expansive novels for years, from Kensington Gardens (2005) to The Invented Part (2017). In his latest, The Bottom of the Sky (Open Letter), Fresán delivers a riff on the glory days of sci-fi writing in what reads as a mash-up of sorts of Kurt Vonnegut, Philip K. Dick, and Roberto Bolaño. First taking off in 1970s New York City, the novel orbits around the friendship between two teenage cousins and the girl who, like a distant planet, exerts a magnetic pull on their lives. Typical of Fresán, the book is a kaleidoscope of ideas and references—incorporating everything from the Kabbalah, pulp zines, and the fall of the Twin Towers—but is, at its heart, the story of lost love and “cosmic loneliness.” (Amazon.com)

Photo: Courtesy of Open Letter.

My German Brother

By Chico BuarqueChico Buarque, Brazilian pop legend and one of the founders of Tropicalismo, has developed into an intriguing and inventive novelist as well, with works such as Budapest (2003), Spilt Milk (2009), and others. The language of My German Brother (Farrar, Straus and Giroux) is musical and serpentine, as he unravels a tale that is part historical mystery, part intellectual and sexual coming-of-age. In 1960s São Paulo, adolescent son Ciccio stumbles upon an old love letter in one of his father’s books—a note from a German woman who his father met while studying in Berlin in the early 30s. Ciccio’s obsessive desire to learn more about his father’s past (and the existence of a possible half brother) leads him to Germany decades later where, an old man now himself, he finds he is no closer to the truth. (Amazon.com)

Courtesy of Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

I Didn’t Talk

By Beatriz BracherBeatriz Bracher’s novel I Didn’t Talk (New Directions), also set in Brazil, covers some of the same territory that Buarque glances by—the militant movements of the 1960s and the government’s brutal repression—but her take is darker, quieter, and more pointed. The novel’s main character, Gustavo, is a São Paulo professor preparing to retire and move outside the city. Like My German Brother’s Ciccio, he struggles to make sense of simmering family resentments and deceptions, all while battling the memory of his imprisonment and torture more than 40 years ago in 1970. Did he snitch on his brother-in-law, Armando, a student radical who was later murdered? He swears he didn’t talk, but he is at a loss to find the words to express the grief and shame that still haunts him—and his country. (Amazon.com)

Courtesy of New Directions.

The Marvellous Equations Of The Dread: A Novel In Bass Riddim

By Marcia Douglas
What is a novel in “bass riddim”? In Jamaican writer-performer Marcia Douglas’s hands, it’s a pulsating tale revolving around the return of Bob Marley’s spirit on a Kingston street corner dubbed Half Way Tree, which throbs with a history of lynching and uprisings. It’s about the transmigration of souls—Marley reappears in the body of a street prophet-madman, one of Jamaica’s so-called “fall-down angels”—but it also celebrates the reggae star’s very physical affair with a deaf woman named Leenah in late-70s London. It’s about Rasta dreams and the powerful vibrations of consciousness that are passed down through generations. (The ghosts of Haile Selassie and Marcus Garvey also make walk-on appearances at Half Way Tree.) Told in brief bursts, or “tracks,” The Marvellous Equations of the Dread (New Directions) is a whirlwind of a novel that sways to an irresistible beat. (Amazon.com)

Courtesy of Peepal Tree Press Ltd.

Flights

By Olga TokarczukOlga Tokarczuk is a Polish writer who crosses borders, literary and geographic, with ease, capturing here a panorama of lives in motion in short vignettes, anecdotes, ruminations, pictures, and maps. Meandering through time and global vistas, Flights (Riverhead, and winner of the 2018 Man Booker International Prize) considers human migration in its myriad forms. The book’s narrator, like the author, shuttles between airports, hotels, and far-flung destinations, pondering eternal questions of belonging and displacement. (Echoing the late English travel writer Bruce Chatwin, famously nomadic himself, she often ends up wondering, “What am I doing here?”) Meanwhile, Tokarczuk interweaves stories of fictional and historical travelers—including Chopin’s sister and a 17th-century Dutch anatomist—preoccupied with their own investigations of the heart, mind, and Achilles tendon. (Amazon.com)

Courtesy of Riverhead Books.

The Bottom Of The Sky

By Rodrigo Fresán
Argentine author Rodrigo Fresán has been spinning wildly original, expansive novels for years, from Kensington Gardens (2005) to The Invented Part (2017). In his latest, The Bottom of the Sky (Open Letter), Fresán delivers a riff on the glory days of sci-fi writing in what reads as a mash-up of sorts of Kurt Vonnegut, Philip K. Dick, and Roberto Bolaño. First taking off in 1970s New York City, the novel orbits around the friendship between two teenage cousins and the girl who, like a distant planet, exerts a magnetic pull on their lives. Typical of Fresán, the book is a kaleidoscope of ideas and references—incorporating everything from the Kabbalah, pulp zines, and the fall of the Twin Towers—but is, at its heart, the story of lost love and “cosmic loneliness.” (Amazon.com)